Ethiopia

When: 2025–2026

Purpose: Strengthen Ethiopia’s medium- and long-term economic planning capacity through OG-ETH, a country calibration of OG-Core designed to assess fiscal policy, structural reforms, debt sustainability, job creation, and the efficiency of public investment.

What happened: UN DESA launched the OG-ETH work through an inception mission and training workshop in Addis Ababa in November 2025. The public materials document the baseline calibration, a repository example with a corporate income tax rate cut to 25%, and workshop demo simulations covering a 15% VAT + 15% excise tax on diesel fuel and a temporary increase in immigration among 20- to 40-year-olds.

Key insights: The Ethiopia materials show how OG-Core can connect fiscal reforms to macroeconomic aggregates, tax revenues, debt, demographics, labor supply, and GDP over time. The diesel fuel tax demo shows additional VAT and excise revenue that can be used to offset deficits, while the immigration shock illustrates how demographic changes flow through population growth, labor supply, and output. Key graphs in the demo materials include debt-to-GDP, diesel fuel prices, consumption effects, immigration rates, population distribution, population growth, labor supply, and GDP. The calibration materials also report a long-run real GDP per capita growth parameter of 6.0% and an initial debt-to-GDP ratio of 32.7%.

Resources: Repository, model documentation, and training documentation.

Models: OG-Core

Stakeholders: UN DESA, UN Resident Coordinator’s Office, Policy Studies Institute (PSI), Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Planning and Development, National Bank of Ethiopia, Ethiopian Economics Association, UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), African Development Bank, IFPRI, and UN-Habitat.